[225003720010] |<title>the psychological reality of truthiness?</title>
[225003720020] |New research out of U. Chicago looked at the effect of foreign accents on trust.
[225003720030] |The brief Flash Report <a>Why don't we believe non-native speakers?</a>
[225003720040] |(PDF; full citation below) found that "People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don't sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker."
[225003720050] |There's a cline of truthiness because the researchers did the following: "Participants listened to each statement and indicated its veracity on a 14 cm line, with one pole labeled de!nitely false and the other definitely true.
[225003720060] |We measured the distance from the false pole in centimeters, so a higher number indicates a more truthful statement." 
[225003720070] |I found this to be a interesting design idea.
[225003720080] |Don't force people to make a clear decision about truth value.
[225003720090] |Frege and Russell be damned, haha!
[225003720100] |Have these researchers discovered the psychological reality of truthiness? 
[225003720110] |On a more serious note, they begin the article with a review of all the ways that processing fluency affects linguistic stimuli judgement. from the paper (reformatted for easy of reading): 
[225003720120] |Stimuli that are easier to process are perceived as
[225003720130] |<li>more familiar</li>
[225003720140] |<li>more pleasant</li>
[225003720150] |<li>visually clearer</li>
[225003720160] |<li>longer and more recent</li>
[225003720170] |<li>louder, less risky</li>
[225003720180] |<li>more truthful</li> 
[225003720190] |For example, people judge “Woes unite foes” as a more accurate description of the impact of troubles on adversaries than“Woes unite enemies,” because the rhyming of woes and foes increases processing fluency.
[225003720200] |Similarly, people judge the statement “Osorno is in Chile” as more true when the color of the font makes it easier to read. 
[225003720210] |Lev-Ari, S., &Keysar, B. (2010).
[225003720220] |Why don't we believe non-native speakers?
[225003720230] |The influence of accent on credibility Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: <a>10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025</a>
[225003730010] |<title>more experiments</title>
[225003730020] |Harvard's <a>Games with Words</a> site has a new game up! 
[225003730030] |Translation Party Idea: type in sentence in English.
[225003730040] |The site then queries Google Translator, translating into Japanese and then back again until it reaches "equilibrium," where the sentence you get out is the sentence you put in.
[225003730050] |Some sentences just never converge.
[225003730060] |Ten points to whoever finds the most interesting non-convergence.
[225003740010] |<title>Cameron's English is "clipped"</title>
[225003740020] |The Economist's quasi-lingo-blog <a>Johnson </a>analyzes the speech of David Cameron.
[225003740030] |They discover that it is
[225003740040] |<li>casual</li>
[225003740050] |<li>not sloppy</li>
[225003740060] |<li>distinctive</li>
[225003740070] |<li>clipped</li>
[225003740080] |<li>concise</li>
[225003740090] |<li>confident</li>
[225003740100] |<li>leaves formal grammar struggling in his wake</li>
[225003740110] |<li>micro-phrasal</li> 
[225003740120] |I find the Economist's analysis sloppy, lacking distinction, whatever the opposite of "clipped" is, meandering, tedious, sniveling, macro-phrasal...sigh.
[225003750010] |<title>Czech Tongue Twister</title>
[225003750020] |Strč prst kskrz krk 
[225003750030] |I'll <a>yogurtize </a>this as "Scott passed us koss cock" 
[225003750040] |HT: <a>Czechly </a>
[225003760010] |<title>more on language death, ctd.</title>
[225003760020] |Razib continues <a>his exploration </a>of the interplay of linguistic diversity/homogeneity and socio-economic disparity/prosperity.
[225003760030] |In a response to a comment, he posted his "bullet points" on 
[225003760040] |1) a common language across large spaces fosters economies of scale. in other words, it fosters coordination and cooperative by reducing the friction in flow of information.
[225003760050] |2) a common language also removes some of the raw material for intergroup conflict. conflict is zero sum, #1 is ideally non-zero sum.
[225003770010] |<title>redundant acronym syndrome syndrome</title>
[225003770020] |Kottke <a>faces his demons</a> and admits he suffers from <a>RAS Syndrome</a> (redundant acronym syndrome syndrome).
[225003770030] |Of the three "linguistic explanations" given on the wiki page, I found #1 to be highly unlikely (it assumes a ridiculousnessly high level of meta-linguistic analysis on the part of the average speaker); #2 and #3 were roughly the same: Acronyms are treated as unanalyzed lexemes.
[225003780010] |<title>on linguistic competition</title>
[225003780020] |CoffeeTeaLinguistics posts <a>an interesting thought experiment</a>: No language requires another language to survive, or any other languages for that matter. 
[225003780030] |My response involved an extension of the isolate thought experiment culminating in my wondering what the implications are if the following two claims are true simultaneously: 
[225003780040] |1. No language requires another language to survive.
[225003780050] |2. No language can remain stable for more than one generation. 
[225003780060] |Read more at <a>CoffeeTeaLinguistics</a>.
[225003800010] |<title>metalinguistically unpossible</title>
[225003800020] |Nate Silver uses the amusing term "unpossible" in this post: <a>It's Like Mathematically Unpossible for Republicans to Win the House, or Something</a>.
[225003800030] |There are a few Urban Dictionary definitions, such as <a>Even more impossible than impossible.
[225003800040] |Quite possibly the most impossiblest thing in the world</a>.
[225003800050] |All three of the examples given seem to be pretty meta-linguistic (in the sense that the speakers are likely aware of the semantic contradictions within the word and are intentionally employing the contradictions for effect; call it Seinfeld Semantics).
[225003810010] |<title>what's the singular of 'feces'?</title>
[225003810020] |The Economist's language blog <a>take a crack</a> at an answer (pun quite intended).
[225003820010] |<title>when good physicists go bad...</title>
[225003820020] |According to a recent article in <a>The New Scientist</a>, the ground-breaking physicist Murray Gell-Mann* has been spending his twilight years (he's now 80) trying to "trace the majority of human languages back to a common root."
[225003820030] |This tower of babel quest is roughly the <a>Grand Unified Theory</a> of linguistics.
[225003820040] |And just like the GUT of physics, it is about as fruitless.
[225003820050] |Many have tried, all have failed.
[225003820060] |Where Einstein failed with GUT (as well as many others), Murray Gell-Mann is likely to fail in linguistics.
[225003820070] |It may be the case that all human languages are descendant from a single progenitor (doubt it), but I see no reason to believe there exists evidence to prove it one way or the other.
[225003820080] |Language has simply not been preserved the way fossils have and language doesn't have the sort of physical reality that elementary particles have.
[225003820090] |So chasing that tail is is going to end up exactly the way all tail-chasing adventures end. 
[225003820100] |*fyi, his ground-breaking work involved <a>categorizing elementary particles</a>.
[225003840010] |<title>swallowing the whorfian pill</title>
[225003840020] |The lingo world is ablaze with references to the recent WSJ article <a>Lost in Translation</a> by Stanford Professor Lera Boroditsky.
[225003840030] |Tweeters have been linking to it like mad and both <a>Language Log</a> (also <a>here</a>) and the Economist's <a>Johnson </a>blog have discussed it (I posted about Professor Boroditsky's work before <a>here </a>and my position mirror's the Johnson's: interesting but not ground breaking and a bit overblown).
[225003840040] |I suspect that lay audiences love Whorfian stuff much like they love peevologists and no word for x discussions.
[225003840050] |A combination of cultural attitudes and fundamental misunderstanding about how language actually works leads to popular lingo-topics that make most linguist yawn or roll their eyes. 
[225003840060] |Along these lines, I stumbled across what appears to be a legitimate, well-meaning, but perhaps somewhat misguided research project: <a>The who/which project</a>.
[225003840070] |From the project web page: 
[225003840080] |One of the underlying causes of ecological destruction is the separation between humans and other animals.
[225003840090] |When nonhuman animals are treated according to balance sheets rather than their own nature, the result can be not only a life of misery for the animals concerned, but environmental devastation.
[225003840100] |This research project looks at one area of language which both reflects and <b>contributes to </b>the gulf between humans and other animals: the pronouns who and which.
[225003840110] |Who, we are told by some but not all dictionaries and grammar books, refers exclusively to humans, which to nonhuman animals, plants and things.
[225003840120] |This project has begun by investigating the use of the pronouns who and which (and perhaps related topics later), starting with what dictionaries and grammar books prescribe and describe.
[225003840130] |Beyond this, the hope is that the project could contribute to efforts to bridge the gap between humans and other animals (emphasis added). 
[225003840140] |If I understand correctly, this project is going to try to analyze written rules for who/which in hopes of discovering some causal link to animal cruelty.
[225003840150] |This is founded on the belief the using a different pronoun to refer to animals causes us to think about them differently.
[225003840160] |I realize I'm exaggerating the project's claims a bit and I'll ask you to forgive me that because I want to lay bare the underlying assumptions.
[225003840170] |There is a Whorfian hypothesis underlying this project's mission.
[225003840180] |Unfortunately, their methodology is far to superficial and simplistic to yield anything useful, I suspect.
[225003840190] |And this comes full circle back to Boroditsky in that even a Standford professor's well designed empirical research on the Whorfian hypothesis gets misunderstood and overblown.
[225003840200] |Poorly designed projects are destined for a <a>Full Liberman</a>.
[225003850010] |<title>discourse is that thing...</title>
[225003850020] |Hal Daume, NLPer extraordinaire, <a>waxes poetic</a> on discourse and concludes that interpretation is abduction  where the purpose of discourse is to give you an interpretation about whatever is not in the sentence itself given that you assume the sentence must be coherent.
[225003850030] |Money quote: what do we have to assume about the world to make this discourse coherent? 
[225003850040] |It was a modest post by a very smart man, but it all seemed a little too Grice-lite to me.
[225003850050] |But Daume gets bonus points for the <a>Jerry Hobbs</a> shout out.
[225003850060] |Not enough linguists read Hobbs. 
[225003850070] |Snowclone bait: isn't 'Xer extraordinaire' a snowclone?
[225003850080] |Time to email Erin...
[225003860010] |<title>just to be clear...</title>
[225003860020] |(personal pic taken <del>in</del> outside of Huachuca City, AZ) Yep, sometimes even the simplest linguist structure requires a little indexical help.
[225003870010] |<title>the linguistics of tetris</title>
[225003870020] |The University of Edinburgh has a new language experiment/game up and running: 
[225003870030] |<b><a>Tetris Experiment</a></b> 
[225003870040] |In Tetris, you must place falling blocks to score points.
[225003870050] |If there is no more room to place blocks, you lose!
[225003870060] |Steer the current block using the left and right arrows.
[225003870070] |Rotate the block with the up arrow and fast-drop it using the down arrow.
[225003870080] |You will play one of two versions of the game: Tetris –Whole horizontal rows are removed.
[225003870090] |Coltris –if more than 4 blocks of the same colour are touching, those blocks are removed. 
[225003870100] |A word will appear with each new block.
[225003870110] |This is the name of the next block in Tetro –a strange and ancient language.Your task is to learn the names of the blocks in Tetro.
[225003870120] |You will be presented with each block and the name for it in Tetro in a Training round.
[225003870130] |These will appear in the top right window.
[225003870140] |You will be tested on your knowledge in a Test round!
[225003870150] |First, you will play Tetris or Coltris for 2 minutes, then you will be trained on Tetro, then do a short test.
[225003870160] |You'll play the game for 2 more minutes, then be trained again and you'll do a long test. 
[225003870170] |HT: <a>The Adventures Of Auck</a>.
[225003880010] |<title>NLP Book</title>
[225003880020] |<a>Alias-i </a>has just released a <a>draft version of a book</a> based on their NLP suit LingPipe 
[225003880030] |Our goal is to produce something with a little more breadth and depth and much more narrative structure than the current LingPipe tutorials.
[225003880040] |Something that a relative Java and natural language processing novice could work through from beginning to end, coming out with a fairly comprehensive knowledge of LingPipe and a good overview of some aspects of natural language processing. 
[225003880050] |Enjoy!
[225003890010] |<title>sigh...</title>
[225003890020] |From a special post titled <a>The evolution of language</a> at The Emporia Gazette (KS) Much of all modern languages in Europe evolved from Latin and Greek. sigh...
[225003900010] |<title>Sunday math quiz</title>
[225003900020] |What's wrong with describing a quantity as x meters or h feet?
[225003900030] |Answer in the first chapter of this free MIT course <a>Street-Fighting Math</a>.
[225003910010] |<title>[having sex] shatner and taboo vocabulary</title>
[225003910020] |<a>Liberman bait</a>: 
[225003910030] |William Shatner, of all people, stands at the center of television's latest moral battleground.
[225003910040] |He's the cantankerous lead character in a new CBS sitcom, "<a>(Bleep) My Dad Says</a>," that is scheduled to air on Thursday nights.
[225003910050] |Rather than "bleep," the <b>title uses a series of symbols </b>that suggest the expletive included in the book title on which the series is based.
[225003910060] |The Parents Television Council last week sent letters to 340 companies that advertise frequently on TV urging them to stay away from the show unless the name is changed.
[225003910070] |The group argues that the title is indecent.
[225003910080] |"Parents really do care about profanity when their kids are watching TV," said PTC President Tim Winter.
[225003910090] |"All parents?
[225003910100] |No, but something like 80 or 90 percent of parents.
[225003910110] |Putting an expletive in the title of a show is crossing new territory, and we can't allow that to happen on our watch" (emphasis &link added). 
[225003910120] |Note, however, that CBS did not go fully arbitrary with their symbols.
[225003910130] |There is more than a little iconicity between  $#! and Shit.
[225003910140] |The dollar sign $ clearly evokes a capital S and the pound sign # evokes an H (though more of a capital H than lower case h).
[225003910150] |Would The Parents Television Council be happy were it called '%!@#* My dad Says'? 
[225003910160] |<b>UPDATE</b>: Ben Zimmer alerted me to the fact that this is old news, see <a>here </a>and <a>here </a>for previous discussions. [having sex] Pullum!
[225003920010] |<title>the linguistics of love</title>
[225003920020] |A recent tweet from <a>CursorTN </a>does a nice bit of frame semantic analysis: the expression for being irrationally in love *should* be "heels over head in love."
[225003920030] |Think about it. 
[225003920040] |Hmmmm, yes, yes, this seems correct.
[225003920050] |What the hell does 'head over heels' mean anyway?
[225003920060] |I'm head over heels right now and I'm sitting at a computer typing! 
[225003920070] |Presumably there is a romantic attraction frame (can't find anything like this at FrameNet, might have missed it) whereby  being in love upsets your natural state. if your natural physical state is standing upright, then you naturally are 'head over heels.'
[225003920080] |Hence, when you are in love, your natural state is up ended and you become 'heels of head.'
[225003920090] |And yet this is not the phrase in use. 
[225003920100] |A little googling and I found a few websites which have discussed this before, but only one gives us some historical background: 
[225003920110] |<a>The Phrase Finder</a>: 'Head over heels' is a good example of how language can communicate meaning even when it makes no literal sense.
[225003920120] |After all, our head is normally over our heels.
[225003920130] |The phrase originated in the 14th century as 'heels over head', meaning doing a cartwheel or somersault. 
[225003920140] |Now can we figure out how the reversal occurred?
[225003930010] |<title>wurfing and polkadodge</title>
[225003930020] |According to a recent story in The Telegraph titled <a>Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered</a>: 
[225003930030] |Millions of "non words" which failed to make the dictionary lie unused in a vault owned by the Oxford University Press. [...] 
[225003930040] |These words were recently submitted for use in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) but will remain dormant unless they enter common parlance in the future. 
[225003930050] |Graphic designer Luke Ngakane, 22, uncovered hundreds of 'non words' as part of a project for Kingston University, London. 
[225003930060] |He said: ''I was fascinated when I read that the Oxford University Press has a vault where all their failed words, which didn't make the dictionary, are kept. 
[225003930070] |''This storeroom contains millions of words and some of them date back hundreds of years. 
[225003930080] |''It's a very hush, hush vault and I really struggled to find out information about it because it is so secretive. 
[225003930090] |The OED Illuminati have all the power! 
[225003930100] |The story provides a small dictionary of non words at the end.
[225003930110] |Personal fav: "earworm", a catchy tune that frequently gets stuck in your head. ewwwww... 
[225003930120] |<b>UPDATE</b>: Ben Zimmer debunks this story <a>here</a>.
[225003930130] |Alas, there is no OED Illuminati...or is that just what Ben wants us to think?
[225003940010] |<title>ant synonyms and linguistics envy</title>
[225003940020] |A cute analogy: Similar molecules which differ slightly in chain length cause similar behavioral reactions in ants.
[225003940030] |Therefore, similar chemicals are like lexical synonyms in human language.
[225003940040] |This is a rough paraphrase of the brief post <a>Chemical Ant Language Has Synonyms</a>. 
[225003940050] |But is the analogy valid? 
[225003940060] |The blog was referring to a study that investigated what appeared to be a pretty straight forward stimulus-response reaction.
[225003940070] |Ants were exposed to a variety of chemicals which differed minimally and their reactions were recorded.
[225003940080] |Upon first pass, it appears as though no sort of cognitive processing occurred in the ants (I cannot speak with any authority on the state of cognitive processing in ants, but I'm guessing it's limited at best).
[225003940090] |The blog post author took the sysnonym analogy straight from the original study Deciphering the Chemical Basis of Nestmate Recognition (full citation below).
[225003940100] |From the abstract: 
[225003940110] |This study contributes to our understanding of the chemical basis of nestmate recognition by showing that, similar to spoken language, the chemical language of social insects contains “synonyms,” chemicals that differ in structure, <b>but not meaning</b> (emphasis added). 
[225003940120] |Linguists have been justly accused of having both <a>physics envy</a> and biology envy for our tendency to borrow concepts from those fields to help understand linguistic processes.
[225003940130] |This, however, may be a case of linguistics envy.
[225003940140] |The use of language as a metaphor for anything remotely communicative is all too familiar to many of us and typically wrong.
[225003940150] |And the public's love of animal language stories fuels the fire. 
[225003940160] |Clearly the findings are interesting to the extent that they show a certain categorical response.
[225003940170] |Apparently ants respond to a set of chemicals in a similar way and this set of chemicals might be loosely compared to a set of synonyms like run, jog, trot, scurry, scamper, sprint, etc.
[225003940180] |But the most interesting thing about lexical synonyms is that they DO differ in meaning and distributional properties.
[225003940190] |Even if the differences are nuanced, they are real.
[225003940200] |Their semantics are related, but it's the differences that are the object of linguistic inquiry.
[225003940210] |So, if the ant response is to be a viable analogy to lexical synonyms, we're going to have to see that each chemical variant produces a similar but interestingly different response in ants. 
[225003940220] |Now, what might be a closer linguistic analogy is that of phonemes.
[225003940230] |Here we have a well undersood phenomenon whereby a set of similar but interestingly different sounds are perceived as belonging to a single class.
[225003940240] |There is also the interesting <a>categorical perception</a> phenomenon where slight differences in sounds can be perceived as whole category differences, not unlike molecules of different chain length causing a similar reaction in ants (I think). 
[225003940250] |Wilgenburg, E., Sulc, R., Shea, K., &Tsutsui, N. (2010).
[225003940260] |Deciphering the Chemical Basis of Nestmate Recognition Journal of Chemical Ecology, 36 (7), 751-758 DOI: <a>10.1007/s10886-010-9812-4</a>
[225003950010] |<title>Marc Hauser on leave???</title>
[225003950020] |An odd development in the language evolution saga.
[225003950030] |Harvard professor <a>Marc Hauser</a> has been forced on leave over an apparent academic misconduct issue regarding a paper he published involving rule learning in monkeys.
[225003950040] |Hauser is well known within language evolution circles.
[225003950050] |He co-authored with Chomsky the (in)famous paper <a>The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve</a>? which argued that 
[225003950060] |...a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)and in the narrow sense (FLN).
[225003950070] |FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements.
[225003950080] |We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.
[225003950090] |We further argue that FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language... 
[225003950100] |This prompted a response from Pinker & Jackendoff: <a>The faculty of language: what’s special about it</a>? which countered Hauser &Chomsky &Fitch saying "The approach ... is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution." 
[225003950110] |<a>Boston.com</a> reports that Hauser "is taking a year-long leave after a lengthy internal investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct in his laboratory.
[225003950120] |The findings have resulted in the retraction of an influential study that he led.
[225003950130] |“MH accepts responsibility for the error,’’ says the retraction of the study on whether monkeys learn rules, which was published in 2002 in the journal Cognition.
[225003950140] |Two other journals say they have been notified of concerns in papers on which Hauser is listed as one of the main authors." 
[225003950150] |Commenters at Razib Khan's <a>Gene Expression</a> post about this fisk the Boston.com article a bit and are worth reading over there.
[225003950160] |Nonetheless, it's a strange turn of events for language evolution. 
[225003950170] |Liberman has a nice analysis of Hauser's work <a>here</a>.
[225003970010] |<title>marc hauser reactions</title>
[225003970020] |The social media world is abuzz with reactions to the <a>Marc Hauser story</a>.
[225003970030] |From the blogs-- 
[225003970040] |<a>Mark Liberman</a>: Like many other linguists, Geoff and I have felt from the beginning that the results of Hauser's monkey experiments were of dubious relevance to the evolution of speech and language.
[225003970050] |Now we're forced to question whether there were any reliable results at all. 
[225003970060] |<a>Drug Monkey</a>: What I am worried about in this type of coverage is the conflation of a failure to replicate a study with the absence of evidence (per the retraction blaming a trainee) with scientific debate over the interpretation of data.
[225003970070] |The mere failure of an investigation to be able to replicate a prior one is not in and of itself evidence of scientific misconduct.
[225003970080] |Scientific findings, legitimate ones, can be difficult or impossible to replicate for many reasons and even if we criticize the credulity, scientific rigor or methods of the original finding, it is not misconduct. 
[225003970090] |<a>John hawks</a>: The problem of subjective data is not unique to Hauser's work but is systemic in the field of primate cognition.
[225003970100] |It reminds me of some discussion in Jeremy Taylor's recent book <a>Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human</a>.
[225003970110] |There's the issue of whether experiments are designed clearly enough to yield conclusions.
[225003970120] |Then there's the second issue of whether observations are replicable, or whether they result only from somewhat "wishful" researchers.
[225003970130] |Such experiments often get heightened scrutiny, but rarely is there clear misconduct.
[225003970140] |That makes this a really shocking case. 
[225003970150] |<a>Razib Khan</a>: Hauser is a prominent public intellectual...Obviously problems in some aspects of his work doesn’t necessarily invalidate all his findings, but it doesn’t look good for his credibility.
[225003970160] |This sort of incident points to the importance of trust within the culture of science.
[225003970170] |Collaborators and researchers who cited his results are scrambling to make sense of it all. 
[225003970180] |<a>Open Parachute</a>: ...we should recognise that we are seeing one of the methods science has for self correction.
[225003970190] |The science community treats deliberate distortion of evidence, poor record keeping and biased interpretation of results very seriously.
[225003970200] |There are going to be people who use this news to attack science.
[225003970210] |But we should ask them if they are prepared to submit their beliefs, ideology or claims to such scrutiny?
[225003970220] |And are they willing to be disciplined if an investigation finds that they have made distorted or false claims? 
[225003970230] |<a>Art Markman</a>: I find cases like this both frustrating and reassuring at the same time.
[225003970240] |The frustrating part of cases of misconduct is fairly obvious.
[225003970250] |As a scientist, all I really have is the integrity of my data.
[225003970260] |Theories are nice, of course.
[225003970270] |We create theories to help us to explain patterns of data.
[225003970280] |But, really, theories are most useful because they help use to develop new questions that we can ask that will help use to collect new data. [...]
[225003970290] |At the same time, cases of misconduct are reassuring.
[225003970300] |Science is remarkably self-correcting.
[225003970310] |When we publish papers in scientific journals, we organize our papers in a way that reflects the ideals laid out by Francis Bacon.
[225003970320] |We give enough of the details about our methods that someone else could repeat the study we are presenting.
[225003970330] |We present details about the analysis of our data.
[225003970340] |After a paper is published, authors often make their data available to others who want to do additional analyses of the work. 
[225003970350] |<a>David Dobbs</a>: To me the allegations, vague as they are, don’t quite rise to shocking yet, though I may be missing something.
[225003970360] |(Please point it out if so.)
[225003970370] |But that confusion underlines how important it is, methinks, for Harvard to spell out just what is being looked at here.
[225003970380] |Not just Hauser but a lot of people who have drawn on, contributed to, or worked parallel to his work are hanging in the wind here. 
[225003970390] |FYI: The author of the original story follows up today with this: <a>Harvard is urged to detail inquiry</a>.
[225003980010] |<title>Harvard responds</title>
[225003980020] |Harvard released <a>a statement</a> yesterday concerning the Marc Hauser retractions (plural, it  includes three papers): 
[225003980030] |Harvard has always taken seriously its obligation to maintain the integrity of the scientific record.
[225003980040] |The University has rigorous systems in place to evaluate concerns about scientific work by Harvard faculty members.
[225003980050] |Those procedures were employed in Dr. Hauser's situation.
[225003980060] |As a result of that process, and in accordance with standard practice, Harvard has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser.
[225003980070] |While Dr. Hauser (or in one instance, his colleague) were directed to explain the issues with these articles to the academic journals that published those papers, the University has also welcomed specific questions from the editors involved.
[225003980080] |We will continue to assist the editors in this process.
[225003980090] |In these types of cases, Harvard follows federal requirements for investigating alleged research misconduct and reports its findings, as required, to the appropriate federal funding agencies, which conduct their own review.
[225003980100] |At the conclusion of the federal investigatory process, in cases where the government concludes scientific misconduct occurred, the federal agency makes those findings publicly available. 
[225003980110] |Still no indication of what the actual misconduct was and why it took three years to investigate.
[225003980120] |Overall <a>reactions</a> around the web seem to be of three kids: 
[225003980130] |1. yeah, we kinda suspected this all along.
[225003980140] |2. we don't know enough yet to judge.
[225003980150] |3. this is the sausage making inherent in the scientific process.
[225003990010] |<title>Eliot Ness takes down Hauser?</title>
[225003990020] |It's a general rule of bad journalism that when a story begins to slow down, it's a journalist's duty to just make things up to squeeze out one or two more articles.
[225003990030] |As far as I know, there has been no new information released about the Marc Hauser story since it broke four days ago <a>here</a>.
[225003990040] |Yet yesterday the NYT writer Nicholas Wade <a>wrote </a>"Marc Hauser’s academic career was soaring when suddenly, three years ago, Harvard authorities <b>raided </b>his laboratory and confiscated computers and records" (emphasis added). 
[225003990050] |Raided?
[225003990060] |Really?
[225003990070] |They <b>raided</b> his lab?
[225003990080] |With shotguns and sledge hammers like Eliot Ness?
[225003990090] |Wade's article simply rehashes what we already know, so it's not clear why the NYT is giving him more and more column inches to fill.
[225003990100] |Wade is quickly making a cottage industry out of repetition of the Hauser story without adding much if any value (see <a>here </a>for an even more vicious critique of Wade).
[225003990110] |Why does he believe there was a "raid" on Hauser lab?
[225003990120] |It's not clear.
[225003990130] |The only indication is a quote later in the article from Michael Tomasello who said “Three years ago when Marc was in Australia, the university came in and <b>seized </b>his hard drives and videos because some students in his lab said, ‘Enough is enough.’
[225003990140] |They said this was a pattern and they had specific evidence” (emphasis added). 
[225003990150] |Tomasello used the word "seize", Wade used the word "raid."
[225003990160] |To me those words have very different connotations.
[225003990170] |Seizing a hard drive can be as mild as some guy walking into a lab with a Starbucks in one hand and a stack of ungraded freshman essays in the other and saying to a couple of exhausted grad students "hey guys, I need to take your hard drives, can you take a break for a minute?"
[225003990180] |A raid, on the other hand, involves shotguns and tear gas.
[225004000010] |<title>I De-ed her...</title>
[225004000020] |Been reading Wallace Stegner's 1976 National Book Award winning novel The Spectator Bird for my book club (must. finish. monday...).
[225004000030] |The author makes some cute observations about the incoherence of the Danish glottal stop (famous amongst tortured first year linguistics grad students who often are assigned to wrestle with its distributive intricacies).
[225004000040] |But the linguistic observations are not limited to phonology. 
[225004000050] |As part of the narrative, the main character, a literary agent named Joe Allston, travels to Denmark and meets a proper, if minor, Danish aristocrat Astrid Wredel-Krarup.
[225004000060] |While reviewing his journals about the time with her, he makes the following declaration to his wife Ruth: 
[225004000070] |Ruth: I called her by her first name after the first day or so.
[225004000080] |Joe: Well, I didn't after two or three months.
[225004000090] |Ever.
[225004000100] |She called me Mr. Allston and I gave her back the full business.
[225004000110] |When I tried Danish, I didn't Du her, I De-ed her. 
[225004000120] |It's a cute illustration of how people negotiate linguistic forms, especially politeness forms.
[225004000130] |This reminded me of a former house-mate of mine who moved to DC after a year teaching ESL in France.
[225004000140] |He took a summer sublet with an older, very proper French speaking Belgian lady and he told me he didn't use the informal tu with her until late in the summer after she explicitly told him it was okay to use it.
[225004010010] |<title>I just don't trust the guy...</title>
[225004010020] |The events surrounding Marc Hauser and his lab over the last week have been fascinating to follow and interesting to wonder about from afar, but the lasting impact didn't really hit home until I read this post: <a>What Are The Origins of Number Representation</a>? 
[225004010030] |<a>The Thoughtful Animal</a> is a good science blog written by a smart grad student at USC.
[225004010040] |And that particular post is an excellent summary of interesting research on human cognition.
[225004010050] |But here's the thing, it includes a review of one of Hauser's papers.
[225004010060] |Though not one of the three papers targeted by the investigation, as far as I know, I felt suspicious.
[225004010070] |I couldn't help it.
[225004010080] |Perhaps I should be less judgmental, but the truth is, I just don't trust the guy.
[225004010090] |I do not claim that's a good thing.
[225004010100] |Again, perhaps I should be more objective, but there is an uncontrollable emotional aspect to the effect of academic misconduct.
[225004010110] |Credibility is gone. 
[225004010120] |This is the inevitable effect of that kind of scandal (and I do think that's an appropriate word to use here) that Hauser is now involved in.
[225004010130] |I can't read any reference to his work sans suspicion (especially work involving qualitative judgments about the behavior of cotton-top tamarin monkeys).
[225004010140] |I could read the original paper, of course, but that wouldn't allay the deep suspicion because I wouldn't be able to review the evidence myself.
[225004010150] |However, if Hauser, and all scholars, would publish their raw data online (as Liberman has called for <a>here</a>) I could make a better informed judgment as to the credibility of that particular paper and its conclusions.
[225004010160] |Unfortunately that option simply isn't available to me ... yet.
[225004020010] |<title>The Top Ten NLPers!!</title>
[225004020020] |There's a LIST!!! 
[225004020030] |From <a>Dr. Jochen L. Leidner’s Blog</a>, 
[225004020040] |For the area Natural Language and Speech, the all-time most high impact researchers are: 
[225004020050] |Robert Mercer Fernando Pereira Kenneth Church Vincent Della Pietra Aravind Joshi Mitchell Marcus Hermann Ney Peter Brown Michael Collins Stephen Della Pietra 
[225004020060] |Congratulations, you awards will be mailed at a later date.
[225004030010] |<title>language of the fishers</title>
[225004030020] |National Geographic is getting much Twitter buzz for their recent article <a>"Lost" Language Found on Back of 400-Year-Old Letter</a>.
[225004030030] |The title alone evokes Indiana Jones and The Da Vinci Code, so people naturally get all jazzed.
[225004030040] |But note the clever use of scare quotes in the title.
[225004030050] |What was actually discovered was an apparent translation of base ten number names from a language, likely one of two known only by the mention of their names in contemporary texts: Quingnam and Pescadora—"language of the fishers".
[225004030060] |I found this quote interesting: 
[225004030070] |"Even though [the letter] <b>doesn't tell us a whole lot</b>, it does tell us about a language that is <b>very different from anything we've ever known</b>—and it suggests that there may be a lot more out there," said project leader Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. (emphasis added). 
[225004030080] |Ummm, if the letter doesn't tell us a whole lot, how do we know this lost language is "very different from anything we've ever known"?
[225004040010] |<title>reports of the death of the printed OED have been slightly exagerated</title>
[225004040020] |Just read a short article suggesting the OED illuminati are at least cognizent of the impending doom of the printed version of the OED.
[225004040030] |I vote yes (no one cares).
[225004040040] |I always hated that little magnifying glass. *fyi, I haven't figured out yet how to copy and paste links using droid x, so you'll have to surf for the article on your own.
[225004040050] |(Copying is easy, pasting not so much)
[225004050010] |<title>Linguist List Jobs?</title>
[225004050020] |I can't be alone in thinking the new Linguist List Jobs page is horribly designed, can I?
[225004050030] |I mean, it's soooooo 1998, right?
[225004060010] |<title>map of nationality suffixes</title>
[225004060020] |(image from <a>Linglish.net</a>) A commenter on Liberman's recent post <a>Ask Language Log: Adjectives from country names</a>? linked to this excellent discussion of nationality suffixes: <a>So many nationality suffixes</a> which contained the map above.
[225004060030] |Well done.
[225004070010] |<title>Collaborative Corpus Linguistics</title>
[225004070020] |<a>Using Pinax and Django For Collaborative Corpus Linguistics</a> from <a>James Tauber</a> on <a>Vimeo</a>. 
[225004070030] |I haven't seen this video yet (it's almost an hour long and using my current connection would take 3 days to buffer), but it seems interesting: 
[225004070040] |After introducing Django and Pinax, this talk discusses Pinax-based tools the speaker is developing to help with web-based collaboration on corpus annotation with applications from lexicography to morphology to syntax to discourse analysis. 
[225004070050] |The speaker is James Tauber.
[225004070060] |According to his web page, he is currently on leave from a PhD in linguistics at the University of Essex where I was researching the inflectional morphology of Ancient Greek.
[225004080010] |<title>the largest whorfian study EVER! (and why it matters)</title>
[225004080020] |Let me take the ball Mark Liberman threw on Monday and run with it a bit.
[225004080030] |Liberman posted <a>a thorough discussio</a>n of Fausey and Broditsky's neo-Whorfian <a>English and Spanish speakers remember causal agents differently</a>.
[225004080040] |Specifically, he invited readers to carefully examine the methodology of the experiments themselves, and not just focus on the conclusions.
[225004080050] |It turns out that a few years ago another set of neo-Whorfians, <a>Jürgen Bohnemeyer</a> and company, published a paper that addressed similar methodological concerns: 
[225004080060] |<a>Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events</a>.
[225004080070] |(With S. Eisenbeiss and B. Narasimhan) Colchester: University of Essex, Department of Language and Linguistics (Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 50: 1-19). 2006. 
[225004080080] |This paper addressed experiments involving motion events like rolling and falling whereas Fausey and Broditsky's work addressed agentivity like breaking and popping, but there's enough overlap to warrant some comparison, particularly since the Bohnemeyer et al. paper specifically addresses methodology wrt Whorfian experiments. 
[225004080090] |But before I get into the details, let me state clearly why I think this is important.
[225004080100] |In other posts, I have dismissed popular lingo-topics like language evolution as outside the mainstream of linguistics because they don't bear directly on what I consider to be the center of the linguistics universe: How the brain does language.
[225004080110] |But linguistic relativity (aka, The Whorfian hypothesis) is one of the great questions of linguistics and cognitive science precisely because it bears directly on the question of how the brain does language.
[225004080120] |And we're only just now developing the proper tools and methodologies to study the question with scientific rigor.
[225004080130] |It may turn out that language does not affect other cognitive processes or the effect is minor.
[225004080140] |I don't care.
[225004080150] |I just want to know one way or the other.
[225004080160] |And it's work like Bohnemeyer's and Broditsky's that will lead us to knowing, eventually. 
[225004080170] |<b>Now the fun stuff</b>.
[225004080180] |Bohnemeyer et al. start with an assumption about language types based on Talmy's cognitive semantics typology that classes languages as either satellite-framing or verb-framing, From <a>Talmy</a>: 
[225004080190] |...languages fall into two main types on the basis of where the Path is represented in a sentence expressing a Motion event [...].
[225004080200] |In this two-category typology, if the Path is characteristically represented in the main verb or verb root of a sentence, the language is "verb framed", but if it is characteristically represented in the satellite and/or preposition, the language is "satellite framed". 
[225004080210] |In this typology, English is a satellite-frame language and Spanish is a verb-frame language.
[225004080220] |Bohnemeyer et al.  conclude that “verb-framed” (V) languages lexicalize path information in the verb root.
[225004080230] |Consequently, they require <b>a separate expression</b> for the “manner” of the motion event [...]
[225004080240] |The additional syntactic position renders manner in V–languages less “codable”.
[225004080250] |Consequently, manner is encoded more routinely in S–language discourse.
[225004080260] |Thus, the question arises <b>whether S–language native speakers also pay more attention to manner</b> when committing a motion event to memory and/or comparing it to other events." (emphasis added). 
[225004080270] |So satellite-frame languages like English push path info into separate phrases and verb-frame languages like Spanish push manner into separate phrases.
[225004080280] |Take the following English sentences:
[225004080290] |<li>The ball rolled down the hill.</li>
[225004080300] |<li>The ball bounced down the hill.</li> 
[225004080310] |In English, the manner of motion (rolling vs. bouncing) is encoded on the verb (i.e., different verbs), but the path is encoded as a separate phrase ("down the hill") as opposed to something like this:
[225004080320] |<li>The ball moved down the hill rollingly.</li> 
[225004080330] |Here the verb move is fairly simple and encodes no manner info by itself.
[225004080340] |As a note, Talmy's typology is based on colloquial and high frequency language use.
[225004080350] |Many languages allow both kinds of constructions, it's just that one is highly frequent in "everyday" speech. 
[225004080360] |And there's the crux of Bohnemeyer et al.'s experiments.
[225004080370] |But, they also noticed conflicting results in several other neo-Whorfian studies that they believed were a result of methodology so they set out to investigate methodology.
[225004080380] |Those other papers used a similarity-judgement task, so Bohememeyer et al. used that task as well.
[225004080390] |Particularly, they gave particpants a series of three short animated videos to watch.
[225004080400] |For example, one video was a tomato rolling down a hill.
[225004080410] |Their methodology is difficult to understand if you just read through, so I'm going to try to help with some bold-facing and re-structuring of paragraphs and a few re-wordings.
[225004080420] |What follows is a near-quote: 
[225004080430] |...we conducted a similarity-judgment task analogous in design to those reviewed above with native speakers of 17 genetically and typologically diverse languages –to our knowledge, <b>the largest sample of languages ever used in a Whorfian study</b>.
[225004080440] |To control for the effects of individual manner or path contrasts, we cross-classified six path types with four manner types, realizing all possible combinations in our stimulus set and counterbalancing for frequency of occurrence. 
[225004080450] |[...
[225004080460] |FYI, the 17 languages were Basque, Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Jalonke, Japanese, Lao, Polish, Spanish, Tamil, Tidore, Tiriyó, Turkish, and Yukatek]
[225004080470] |The materials consisted of 72 triads (i.e., 72 sets of three videos).
[225004080480] |The targets (i.e., main videos) were 24 motion-event video-animations which systematically varied:
[225004080490] |<li>four manners of motion (SPIN, ROLL, BOUNCE, SLIDE),</li>
[225004080500] |<li>three scenarios with different “ground” objects (inclined ramp; field with tree and rock; field with hut and cave), and</li>
[225004080510] |<li>two directed paths (motion UP/RIGHT, DOWN/LEFT)</li> 
[225004080520] |For each of these targets (e.g. tomato-ROLLs-UP-RAMP, see Figure1), we created a same-manner (different-path) variant (e.g. tomato-ROLLs-DOWN-RAMP), and three types of same-path (different-manner) variants (here, OUNCE/SLIDE/SPIN-UP-RAMP).
[225004080530] |This resulted in 72 triads with a target clip, a same-manner variant and one of the three same-path variants.
[225004080540] |The variants were presented side by side, 1 second after the target-clip presentation ended (see Figure 1). <a><img/></a>(figure from page 7) Their methodology was as follows (emphasis added to help readability):
[225004080550] |<li>The 72 triads were distributed across <b>6 randomized presentation lists</b> in a Latin-square design.</li>
[225004080560] |<li>Each list was given to <b>two participants per language</b> (in reverse presentation order).</li>
[225004080570] |<li>Each list contained <b>12 triads</b>, with the target clips combining the four manners of motions with the three scenarios so that each participant saw all 12 combinations in the target clip.</li>
[225004080580] |<li>The number of UP/RIGHT and DOWN/LEFT motions in the target- and variant-clips as well as the manners of motions in the different-manner variants was <b>counterbalanced across the lists</b>, as was the position in which the variants were presented on the screen.</li>
[225004080590] |<li>The <b>position of the ground objects remained the same</b> in all clips.</li>
[225004080600] |<li>Minimal variations in the triad clips allow us to take into account the effects of different manners, paths and scenarios, but make our <b>test triads quite similar</b>.</li>
[225004080610] |<li>Added <b>38 filler triads</b> to each list, which involved other types of events and variations (e.g. replacing either the agent or the goal in a possession-transfer event with another character) and served to prevent the participants from settling into a fixed response pattern.</li>
[225004080620] |<li>Instructions to participants were <b>translated into their native languages</b>.</li> 
[225004080630] |So participants were watching a bunch of short videos in sets of three [A, B, C].
[225004080640] |If I understand correctly, for each set, they were asked to determine if B or C is more similar to A than the other.
[225004080650] |For example, imagine I show you three cartoons: 
[225004080660] |A) a tomato rolling up a hill (forget physics, it's cartoon world).
[225004080670] |B) a tomato rolling down a hill.
[225004080680] |C) a tomato bouncing up a hill. 
[225004080690] |Then I ask you to chose B or C as more similar to A (forced choice, you gotta pick one).
[225004080700] |If you say B, then the manner of rolling is more salient for you than directional path.
[225004080710] |If you say C, then directional path is more salient than manner. 
[225004080720] |Now, if your native language forces you to push path information into separate phrases like prepositional phrases (e.g., "up a hill"), it may be the case that this would cause you to say C is more similar because the path is the same.
[225004080730] |Hence your language caused your perception of similarity to behave in a particular way, hence language affects thought. 
[225004080740] |So what did they discover?
[225004080750] |<li>First, they found no simple categorical distinction between verb-frame language speakers and satellite-language speakers decisions.
[225004080760] |If they had, it would have been fairly strong evidence for linguistic relativity and maybe then they'd be the ones writing WSJ articles instead of Broditsky, haha.</li> 
[225004080770] |<li>They did find that manner of motion by itself seemed to influence similarity judgement significantly (in the technical sense), but this influence was independent of language (i.e., it didn't have anything clearly to do with verb-framing or satellite-framing).</li> 
[225004080780] |<li>They found that the data they gathered could not be accounted for by socio-cultural factors because they had such a diverse participant pool.</li> 
[225004080790] |<li>Interestingly, they did find that contrasts between certain manner pairs DID correlate significantly with language.
[225004080800] |So, Turkish speakers (a verb-frame language) chose the video with the same manner 88% of the time when the contrast was slide vs. roll, but only 50% of the time when it was roll vs. bounce.
[225004080810] |They left open the question of why this is so.</li> 
[225004080820] |<li>The most striking conclusion, however, was that more is better in the sense that they discovered that "strong claims regarding the (in)validity of the Whorfian hypothesis in the encoding of motion events <b>cannot be made on the basis of a limited number of languages</b> or a restricted range of manner and path contrasts." (emphasis added).</li> 
[225004080830] |I found the following passage to be <b>the most important</b> in the paper, especially wrt Fausey and Broditsky's work: 
[225004080840] |If only Polish (an S-language) and Yukatek (a V-language) had been selected to test for language-specific performance effects in our nonlinguistic task, the highly significant difference between speakers of these two languages in their degree of manner preference would have supported a strong version of the Whorfian claim.
[225004080850] |Conversely, had we chosen only to contrast German (S) with Spanish (V) using the identical stimuli and experimental procedure, we would have reached the opposite conclusion, since speakers of these languages do not differ significantly from one another in the frequency with which they base their similarity judgements on manner of motion. 
[225004080860] |The lesson here is that methodology counts.
[225004080870] |Fausey and Broditsky used a very small participant pool and it's hard to tell how that affected their results. 
[225004080880] |FYI: the word profound does not occur in Bohnemeyer's article. 
[225004080890] |Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Sonja Eisenbeiss, &Bhuvana Narasimhan (2006).
[225004080900] |Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events ESSEX RESEARCH REPORTS IN LINGUISTICS, 50, 1-19
[225004090010] |<title>A Virtual Linguistics Campus</title>
[225004090020] |Via Twitter, I just discovered the University of Marburg's <a>The Virtual Linguistics Campus</a>, a set of online courses covering a wide range of linguistics topics.
[225004090030] |Basically, a degree in linguistics online, roughly.
[225004090040] |The costs appear to be quite low too.
[225004090050] |A 50€ registration fee per term and 30€ per class.
[225004090060] |You could take 20 classes over 2 years for about 800€.
[225004090070] |Not bad. 
[225004090080] |I object to their categorizing psycholinguistics as "Applied Linguistics" but they have a nice set of Language Technology courses and surprisingly, a Project Management course (though it's not clear if it's specific to linguistics projects, though that would be a great class to offer).
[225004100010] |<title>What actually affects thought?</title>
[225004100020] |Guy Deutscher's recent NYT article <a>Does Your Language Shape How You Think</a>? is getting  a lot of buzz on Twitter and blogs.
[225004100030] |I already posted a review of some linguistic relativity research <a>here</a>, and Mark Liberman has promised to discuss Deutscher's article at length and Greg Downey has posted <a>a thoughtful review</a> as well, so I don't want to milk this too much, but I just read the article and have a few comments worth airing. 
[225004100040] |First, when I started becoming a linguist over ten years ago, I was not a fan of linguistic relativity, <a></a>though I only had a passing understanding of what it actually meant.
[225004100050] |I'm a bit more sympathetic these days in much the same way Deutscher appears to be.
[225004100060] |He makes the point that language can affect "habits of mind" (though he clearly dismisses the strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis; you can read Whorf's original paper <a>here</a>, pdf).
[225004100070] |This is reminiscent of Lane Greene's comment that language "<a>nudges thought</a>." 
[225004100080] |But what both Deutscher and Greene get at remains unsolved: exactly what is affecting what?
[225004100090] |How is nudging thought different than shaping it?
[225004100100] |It's a battle of metaphors and I don't think Deutscher wins (or loses) with his habits of mind phrase.
[225004100110] |It's still unclear what's going on and our metaphors are just muddying the waters more, not less. 
[225004100120] |Lay people have a tendency to light up at the question "does language shape/affect how you think" in a way they wouldn't if it were "does <b>vision </b>shape/affect how you think?" or "does <b>math </b>shape/affect how you think?" 
[225004100130] |The pattern I see in the literature is to show that <b>language evokes associations between concepts</b>.
[225004100140] |Well, duh.
[225004100150] |How groundbreaking of a claim is that?
[225004100160] |A strong wind evokes associations between concepts.
[225004100170] |That's just how the brain works.
[225004100180] |I can't walk into a Chinese restaurant without the smells evoking memories of my summer near Hong Kong ten years ago.
[225004100190] |How much funding can I get to study how soy sauce shapes thought?
[225004100200] |Are evoking associations and shaping thought the same thing?
[225004100210] |I honestly don't know. 
[225004100220] |That said, here are a few somewhat random reactions to Deutscher's article:
[225004100230] |<li>His anecdote about French and German "compelling" their speaker's to inform about sex of a neighbor simply because the word for neighbor has a gender is a bit disingenuous because those same languages provide multiple constructions for referring to people (as does English, see Pullum's latest rant on <a>singular they</a>).
[225004100240] |This would be a nice corpus study idea: What is the frequency of gender neutral referring expressions in natural conversations in French and German compared to gendered expressions?</li> 
[225004100250] |<li>He makes a good point that a language can force a speaker to attend to certain features, but then again so can other things.
[225004100260] |The broader question is 'what causes salience?'
[225004100270] |Language?
[225004100280] |Yes.
[225004100290] |Experience?
[225004100300] |Yes.
[225004100310] |Vision?
[225004100320] |Yes...</li> 
[225004100330] |<li>I think this is a gross overstatement: "Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman."
[225004100340] |This sounds like strong personification and I just don't see evidence that it's true.</li> 
[225004100350] |<li>I find this incoherent: “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue."</li> 
[225004100360] |<li>For some interesting research on German gender and classification see <a>Metonymic pathways to neuter-gender human nominals in German</a>:  Klaus-Michael Kopcke and David A. Zubin.
[225004100370] |2003?.
[225004100380] |The researchers propose more of a conceptual structure analysis of the facts than a neo-Whorfian might  (i.e., how we conceptualize categories influences how we speak about them rather than the other way around), but I haven't had time to read the paper in depth.</li> 
[225004100390] |<li>Deutscher's anecdote about hotel rooms rang hallow.
[225004100400] |I happen to travel a lot (I mean A LOT) and I almost always stay in a particular brand of hotel because my company gets a deal.
[225004100410] |So I experience this mirror-image hotel room phenomenon often.
[225004100420] |Sometimes multiple times a week.
[225004100430] |But I never feel like I'm seeing "the same room twice."
[225004100440] |If I move to a mirror-image room, believe me, I notice it immediately and it's clearly disorienting.
[225004100450] |And I'm no speaker of Guugu Yimithirr.</li> 
[225004100460] |<li>The anecdote about the Guugu Yimithirr speaker who pointed to his chest to indicate the direction behind him was just weird.
[225004100470] |He wouldn't just turn and point?
[225004100480] |He actually points to himself?
[225004100490] |I'll need videographic evidence please.
[225004100500] |I worry that Deutscher is pulling a Hauser (...too soon?).</li> 
[225004100510] |<li>Factoid alert!
[225004100520] |1 in 10 words in Guugu Yimithirr are cardinal direction words north, south, east, west.
[225004100530] |Really!
[225004100540] |Really?
[225004100550] |Really.
[225004100560] |I'll need evidence please.
[225004100570] |I kinda doubt this.</li> 
[225004100580] |This list comes across as more negative than it should.
[225004100590] |I enjoyed Deutscher's article.
[225004100600] |Also, this was a short, general audience review of complicated linguistic issues (that I hope he addresses more fully in his forthcoming book). 
[225004100610] |<b>Full disclosure</b>: I was contacted on Aug 30th by Deutscher's publisher, Henry Holt And Company, via email and offered a review copy of his forthcoming book <a>Through The Language Glass</a>.
[225004100620] |I responded with my mailing address and hope to receive a copy soon, but I have not received any confirmation one way or the other.
[225004100630] |My discussion of his article above has nothing do with the offer of a review copy of his book.
[225004100640] |Guy Deutscher (2010).
[225004100650] |Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
[225004100660] |New York Times
[225004110010] |<title>debunking chomsky's poverty of the stimulus</title>
[225004110020] |Melody, a researcher in cognitive science at Stanford, has posted <a>a detailed discussion</a> of the problems with Chomsky's famed <a>povery of the stimulus</a> argument from the perspective of the last 40 years of computational learning models.
[225004110030] |Hindsight is always 20-20 right? 
[225004110040] |Money quote: 
[225004110050] |....there are at least two goals of modeling in cognitive science : 1) to discover the best computational method of accounting for a given phenomena, 2) to discover the best account that is also psychologically plausible. 
[225004110060] |The goal has never been to rule out a whole class of models on the basis of one ill-starred example.
[225004110070] |Because —quite frankly —models don’t deal in ‘logical possibilities.’
[225004110080] |They are not mathematical or logical proofs.
[225004110090] |Step 3 in Miller and Chomsky’s paper is a pseudo-scientific non sequitur. 
[225004110100] |The whole post is well worth reading.
[225004120010] |<title>the original Whorf</title>
[225004120020] |Guy Deutcher's NYT's article on how language affects thought continues to get buzz, as surely his book <a>Through The Language Glass</a> will when people read it (it was just released 3 days ago and is currently #234 on Amazon's book rank).
[225004120030] |One common reaction amongst bloggers is that Deutscher gives Whorf himself unfairly harsh treatment, and ultimately mis-represents Whorf's own opinions. 
[225004120040] |For example, Kathryn Woolard, SLA President, says "Whorf’s own statements of his theory look little like the caricature that opens the NYT article and much more like the position that Deutscher himself offers as reasonable and compelling.
[225004120050] |Far from holding that “the inventory of ready-made words” in a language “forbids” speakers to think specific thoughts, Whorf argued that patterns of grammatical structures, often the most covert ones at that, give rise not to a language prison but to a “provisional analysis of reality” and habits of mind, very much as Deutscher concludes." 
[225004120060] |Mark Liberman says "And in fairness to Whorf, he mostly ... suggested that linguistic differences would have exactly the sorts of minor biasing effects on perception and memory that Boroditsky and others have found." 
[225004120070] |Greg Downey says "The one thing that turns me off to Duetscher’s writings is his pretty harsh bashing of Benjamin Whorf, who, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting anthropological linguists." 
[225004120080] |However, we don't need to rely on these secondary sources to stand up for Whorf, we can read one of Whorf's original papers that started this kerfluffel (60 years ago): <a>Science and Linguistics</a> (pdf).
[225004120090] |Happily for the lay reader, that paper is neither very science-ee nor linguistic-ee, nor is it very long.
[225004120100] |It's actually quite readable.
[225004120110] |It's basically a series of thought experiments and casual language facts.
[225004120120] |If you can read Deutescher's article, you can read Whorf's. 
[225004120130] |So let's take a look at what Whorf said <b>in his own words</b>.
[225004120140] |Whorf begins the article by describing what he calls "natural logic": Every normal person in the world, past infancy in years, can and does talk.
[225004120150] |By virtue of that fact, every person —civilized or uncivilized —carries through life certain naive but <b>deeply rooted ideas about talking and its relation to thinking</b>.
[225004120160] |Because of their firm connection with speech habits that have become unconscious and automatic, these notions tend to be rather intolerant of opposition.
[225004120170] |They are by no means entirely personal and haphazard; their basis is definitely systematic, so that we are justified in calling them a system of <b>natural logic</b> (emphasis added). 
[225004120180] |He then goes on to describe what natural logic says about the difference between language and thought.
[225004120190] |Namely that "Natural logic says that talking is merely an incidental process concerned strictly with communication, not with formulation of ideas.
[225004120200] |Talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to “express” what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically.
[225004120210] |Formulation is an independent process, called thought or thinking, and is supposed to be largely indifferent to the nature of particular languages.[...]
[225004120220] |Natural logic holds that different languages are essentially parallel methods for expressing this one-and-the-same rationale of thought and, hence, differ really in but minor ways..." 
[225004120230] |So Whorf claims that the average person is walking around (in 1940, mind you) believing that language and thought are independent processes and that thought is the same across all people, it's only languages that differ, and only slightly.
[225004120240] |Personally I find this a simplistic straw man argument.
[225004120250] |I'm not convinced all that many people held this view.
[225004120260] |Nonetheless, Whorf spends the rest of the article attacking his own straw man.
[225004120270] |A little too easy.
[225004120280] |But let's see what he actually says. 
[225004120290] |Whorf then says that because people hold this view of natural logic, we are unable to see its flaws, that it is a part of our background assumptions and hence invisible to our thinking.
[225004120300] |This becomes a crucial part of his argument.
[225004120310] |We are unable to to imagine possibilities outside of natural logic: What it might well suggest to us today is that, if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious.
[225004120320] |Never having experienced anything in contrast to it, <b>we cannot isolate it and formulate it as a rule</b> until we so enlarge our experience and expand our base of reference that we encounter an interruption of its regularity (emphasis added).
[225004120330] |This rung quite hollow with me.
[225004120340] |He uses a couple of examples that undermine his very point.
[225004120350] |He asks us to imagine a person who could only see blue.
[225004120360] |That person would be unable to discover that they could only see blue because they wouldn't know what it was not see something else.
[225004120370] |Then he writes about gravity: The phenomenon of gravitation forms a rule without exceptions; needless to say, <b>the untutored person is utterly unaware of any law of gravitation</b>, for it would never enter his head to conceive of a universe in which bodies behaved otherwise than they do at the earth’s surface (emphasis added). 
[225004120380] |Huh?
[225004120390] |Neither the blue-only example nor the gravity-ignorant example are convincing precisely because we stand (as they did in 1940) as examples of the opposite.
[225004120400] |Humans only perceive a limited range of the <a>electromagnetic spectrum</a> (not as limited as blue only, but limited nonetheless).
[225004120410] |Yet we managed to discover our limitations!
[225004120420] |Same with gravity.
[225004120430] |Note the qualifier Whorf added "untutored person."
[225004120440] |How did the tutored person get that way?
[225004120450] |At some point, she was tutored by someone else, but there was someone who first grasped that gravity must be a force.
[225004120460] |More to the point, Whorf assumes a model of the average person wherein imagination does not exist.
[225004120470] |I agree that people can be biased by their beliefs about the world, but we are not as trapped by them as Whorf seems to believe. 
[225004120480] |Next, Whorf lists two fallacies of natural logic:
[225004120490] |<li>It does not see that the phenomena of a language are to its own speakers largely of a background character and so are outside the critical consciousness and control of the speaker.</li> 
[225004120500] |<li>It confuses agreement about subject matter, attained through use of language, with knowledge of the linguistic process by which agreement is attained.</li> 
[225004120510] |The first one I've already addressed, but the second one is interesting.
[225004120520] |Basically, it says that we mistake what it means when we agree through language.
[225004120530] |If we agree on directions to the movies, then we assume there is some objective fact we've discovered about the world, otherwise we would not have come to agree.
[225004120540] |I think there is something to this.
[225004120550] |And this is why it's difficult to break past our biases (essentially, agreement masquerades as objectivity).
[225004120560] |But again, Whorf takes it too far and writes, in all caps to be sure we all understand that this is an important point: THIS AGREEMENT IS REACHED BY LINGUISTIC PROCESSES, OR ELSE IT IS NOT REACHED. 
[225004120570] |But surely there are examples of non-linguistic agreement in the world?
[225004120580] |Imagine two strangers are passing each other in a tight hallway, and they both move a bit to make way.
[225004120590] |Have they not agreed to not collide?
[225004120600] |Yes there are cultural attitudes bound to this situation, but they need not be linguistic.
[225004120610] |I think evolutionary biologists could list cooperative strategies that non-humans engage in to survive and because they are non-humans, they cannot be linguistic strategies, right?
[225004120620] |Do we need to claim that agreement and cooperation are different to save Whorf's point? 
[225004120630] |Whorf continues by claiming it was the expansion of comparative linguistics that really led to the ability to think outside the box and that led to recognition that our perception of the world is not the same  thing as the world itself.
[225004120640] |This really is the crucial paragraph in the paper: 
[225004120650] |When linguists became able to examine critically and scientifically a large number of languages of widely different patterns, their base of reference was expanded; they experienced an interruption of phenomena hitherto held universal, and a whole new order of significances came into their ken.
[225004120660] |It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself <b>the shaper of ideas</b>, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade.
[225004120670] |Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars.
[225004120680] |<b>We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages</b>.
[225004120690] |The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, <b>the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds</b> —and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.
[225004120700] |We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way —an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
[225004120710] |The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees (emphasis added). 
[225004120720] |I think the underlying conclusion here is perfectly fair: our cognitive processes cut up the world in particular ways.
[225004120730] |We parse the input, so to speak.
[225004120740] |We parse the visual input, the auditory input, and all the other inputs flowing into our bodies as we go about our lives.
[225004120750] |But he still takes it too far by suggesting that our minds are largely linguistic systems.
[225004120760] |I just do not think that's true. 
[225004120770] |And here Whorf introduces the term relativity: We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can insome way be calibrated.
[225004120780] |Again, I think this is a fair claim as it stands.
[225004120790] |He then goes into a critique of word classes (aka, parts-of-speech) that is pretty familiar to anyone who's taken an intro to syntax class and very familiar to me since I was in part trained by a typologist who is famous for this kind of argument.
[225004120800] |Yep, word classes are bunk (in the sense that there's no universality to them).
[225004120810] |But he also perpetuates the now classic Eskimo snow hoax at the same time.
[225004120820] |He then gives examples of how English and Hopi differ, and calls Hopi a "timeless language." 
[225004120830] |He ends by arguing that a scientist from a timeless culture would have a hard time talking to a scientist from our culture because their notions of velocity and intensity would be different.
[225004120840] |I thought those last few paragraphs were vague and poorly argued overall. 
[225004120850] |Now keep in mind that this is just one of Whorf's papers, not his entire body of work.
[225004120860] |Benjamin Lee Whorf (1940).
[225004120870] |Science and Linguistics MIT Technology Review, 42 (6)
[225004130010] |<title>past tense</title>
[225004130020] |There is a place that looked like a dance studio to me in the mt. pleasant neighborhood of dc named "past tense" and the play on meanings escaped me until i learned it is actually a yoga studio.
[225004130030] |Ahhhhhh... 
[225004130040] |UPDATE: I added the photo 09/09/10.
[225004140010] |<title>street art grammar</title>
[225004140020] |Found this street art at the corner of Madison Dr. and 7th.
[225004140030] |NW DC (the Smithsonian sculpture garden).
[225004140040] |Quick question: why is AINT quoted?
[225004140050] |Is this the artist name (note the lack of an apostrophe, suggesting this is not ain't).
[225004150010] |<title>what is a "pair"</title>
[225004150020] |I started a new photo project this weekend involving the idea of pairs of things when I walked by the example above of two crossed pieces of tape.
[225004150030] |I immediately dismissed it as not an example of a pair of things and walked on, then stopped and thought, wait a second, why isn't that a pair? 
[225004150040] |To me, there's something about the fact of crossing that blocks this as being a pair of tapes.
[225004150050] |However, the phrase a pair of scissors is just fine and that involves two crossed things and a pair of pants is fine and that involves two things sewn together.
[225004150060] |However, in those two cases, I don't really decompose the constituent semantically.
[225004150070] |I treat it as a whole.
[225004150080] |It's simply a historical coincidence to me that we use the word pair.
[225004150090] |I don't really think of scissors and pants as a true pair of things. 
[225004150100] |Now, the nuts and bolts below, those are clearly pairs to me.
[225004160010] |<title>70% of this claim is bullshit</title>
[225004160020] |On average, 70 per cent of our total verbal experience is in our head," estimates Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University in California. 
[225004160030] |This is an incoherent claim, we'll see why in a second. 
[225004160040] |I ran across this quote in the latest article on linguistic relativism, <a>What's in a name?
[225004160050] |The words behind thought</a> by David Robson, which surveys a variety of experimental results showing top-down processes where language has some effect on mental behaviors.
[225004160060] |The article chooses not to balance this with experimental evidence showing bottom-up processing effects, but yes, there are those too. 
[225004160070] |It's a typical lightweight article that only gives you snippets on one side of a complex issue and tries to make complex things look so obvious and easy only a dummy would think otherwise.
[225004160080] |It's Fox News for linguists.
[225004160090] |It's designed to make readers say, "well, of course, that's obvious" without critically engaging in the truly interesting complexities of cognitive processes.
[225004160100] |So, back to Boroditsky's claim (I've mentioned her so much recently, I can now type her name correctly on the first try almost every time).
[225004160110] |Let me ask a simple question:
[225004160120] |<li><b>In what way could it be possible that anything less than 100% of our total verbal experience is in our head?</b></li> 
[225004160130] |Give me an example of just one verbal experience that is NOT in our head (I will accept getting hit over the head with a dictionary, if only for pure slapstick value).
[225004160140] |Also, calling "70 per cent of our total verbal experience" an average requires a funky meaning of "our total verbal experience."
[225004170010] |<title>get it?!</title>
[225004170020] |And the award for cleverest title for a linguistic relativity article goes to... 
[225004170030] |<a>Bluer Rather Than Pinker</a>
[225004180010] |<title>Ivan added themselves</title>
[225004180020] |I just subscribed to <a>academia.edu</a> which advertises itself as Facebook for academics. 
[225004180030] |First of all, there already is a Facebook for academics...it's called Facebook. 
[225004180040] |Second, can't they at least learn from <a>Facebook's example</a>?
[225004180050] |They're having the same issue with singular/plural they:
[225004190010] |<title>woulda coulda shoulda with cigarettes and booze</title>
[225004190020] |David Crystal recently <a>debunked the claim</a> by a Mad Men cast member that There was no ‘gonna’ or ‘shoulda’ back then [in the 1960's] by citing examples going back as far as 1602. 
[225004190030] |I decided to plug in four relevant strings* into COHA and see what's what: 
[225004190040] |gonnanada. zip. zilch. bupkiss. woulda<a><img/></a> coulda<a><img/></a> shoulda<a><img/></a> With the exception of gonna, they show the same pattern of a rise in frequency throughout the 20th Century, and all were in use in the 1960s for sure.
[225004190050] |Now I suspect this rise in frequency has more to do with editing than language use.
[225004190060] |I suspect it has gradually become more and more acceptable to print these forms in publications.
[225004190070] |The mystery remains why gonna did not come along for the ride. 
[225004190080] |*note that I literally mean strings, not words.
[225004190090] |There are potentially other spellings of these forms.
[225004200010] |<title>favre syntax</title>
[225004200020] |ESPN just used the following playful phrase: 
[225004200030] |The best is Brett to come. 
[225004200040] |Language like this is hard to critiqe, but I felt his made more sense: 
[225004200050] |The Brett is best to come. 
[225004200060] |The ESPN version maintains greater fidelity to the original syntax while mine maintains greater fidelity to the original semantics. 
[225004200070] |FYI: as far as I can tell, there is no backslash on my droid keyboard options.
[225004200080] |Hence, no html.
[225004200090] |Frik!
[225004200100] |UPDATE: I used my home computer to add italics.
[225004210010] |<title>If your teacher corrected graffiti</title>
[225004210020] |(image from <a>this blog</a>) 
[225004210030] |(HT <a>matthiasrascher</a>)
[225004220010] |<title>syncing vs. synching</title>
[225004220020] |The commenters over at Liberman's post <a>Apico-labials in English</a> all clearly prefer the spelling syncing, but I find it just weird looking and find synching more betterer. 
[225004220030] |Google does little to resolve the issue:
[225004220040] |<li>syncing = 3,840,000 hits</li>
[225004220050] |<li>synching = 3,830,000 hits</li> 
[225004220060] |However, it's worth noting that that Google's spell check red-underlines synching (and also that their hit counts suck). 
[225004220070] |Over at <a>COHA</a>, the issue is more clear:
[225004220080] |What the graph says is that while historically syncing has been the preferred spelling, synching has taken a sudden and dramastical lead.
[225004220090] |In other words, I'm winning.
[225004220100] |Damn right. 
[225004220110] |COHA charts (same data as above) syncing<a><img/></a> synching<a><img/></a>
[225004240010] |<title>Through the Language Glass (Part 1)</title>
[225004240020] |The publisher Henry Holt and Company was kind enough to send me a review copy of Guy Deutscher's new book <a>Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages</a> which bills itself as "demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial" but which also goes beyond that and purports to demonstrate that language affects thought, if only via habits of mind. 
[225004240030] |This is part one of a two part review.
[225004240040] |I expect to post Part 2 next Monday, Sept. 20th.
[225004240050] |My division into two reviews follows the book's own division:
[225004240060] |<li>Part 1: The Language Mirror (pages 1-126)</li>
[225004240070] |<li>Part 2: The Language Lens (129-249)</li> 
[225004240080] |<b>Part 1: The Language Mirror</b>
[225004240090] |The general goal of the first part of the book is to establish that language does in fact reflect culture; that it is a mirror in some non-trivial ways of the culture of the speakers.
[225004240100] |However, Deutscher begins the book by clearly debunking many tired canards about specific languages reflecting crude stereotypes about its speakers.
[225004240110] |Is French really the most logical language, as my PhD advisor was fond of jokingly claiming?
[225004240120] |No, it is not (sorry JP, haha). 
[225004240130] |Overall, Deutscher is a clear and enjoyable writer to read.
[225004240140] |He does a good job of reviewing basic, but important facts about language and linguists.
[225004240150] |Facts that need to be understood by the reader if the rest of the book is to be appreciated.
[225004240160] |These includes arbitrariness of the sign, cultural transmission, abstraction, and categorization. 
[225004240170] |So how dose languages mirror their speakers? 
[225004240180] |Deutscher spends 95 pages (38% of the whole book and 75% of Part 1) arguing that the inventory of color terms in a language reflects the state of the culture's <u>need</u> to distinguish one color from another as well as its exposure to a wide range of hues (particularly, artificial).
[225004240190] |The basic facts, which have been established by about 150 years of empirical findings, are these:
[225004240200] |<li>All languages have a set of color terms (words that name colors).</li>
[225004240210] |<li>Languages do not share the same color terms (e.g., some have no word for blue and what gets labeled as blue in one language may differ from what what gets labeled as blue in another).</li>
[225004240220] |<li>Color terms are not arbitrary (each term refers to a coherent subset of the visible spectrum)</li>
[225004240230] |<li>Acquisition of color terms is predictable (i.e., language acquire names for color terms in a predictable order.</li> 
[225004240240] |The predictable order of acquisition is this: 
[225004240250] |<b>black </b>&<b>white </b>><b>red</b> ><b>yellow</b>/<b>green </b>><b>blue</b> What this says is that all languages have terms for black and white.
[225004240260] |If a language has a third color term, it refers to red.
[225004240270] |If that language has a fourth color term, it refers to either yellow or green.
[225004240280] |And so on.
[225004240290] |See WALS for <a>more</a>. 
[225004240300] |Deutscher goes to great lengths to establish these facts.
[225004240310] |Maybe too great.
[225004240320] |I felt he beat this horse a bit too long and hard.
[225004240330] |The average reader may disagree.
[225004240340] |Ultimately, we get no satisfying answer as to why this pattern exists (that's science's fault, just haven't figured it out yet, but Deutscher build this up pretty high to give us such a weak landing). 
[225004240350] |And this brings me to my first critique of Part 1: This is just too light weight for me.
[225004240360] |I was expecting a more rigorous scientific work, and what I got was Gladwell-lite.
[225004240370] |The first three of the five chapters of Part 1 read more like pop biography than serious cognitive science.
[225004240380] |They each begin by introducing us to an historical 19th Century figure who was crucial in the emerging field of color term research.
[225004240390] |Deutscher describes each man's lost contribution with the affection of a smitten history student trying to re-fight battles that ended before his grandfather was born.
[225004240400] |It's a particular genre of history that is not uncommon (think Ken Burns' The Civil War), but I found it beside the point.
[225004240410] |Can we please get down to the business of how language affects thought, I kept thinking.
[225004240420] |Worse, despite his lengthy explications, he never quite convinced me that color terms was the crucial topic he needs it to be in order to justify such lengthy discussion.
[225004240430] |His own obsession with color term research leads him to over-emphasize the topic, to the detriment of many other crucial topics (which he does in fact get to, but a little too late and a dollar short). 
[225004240440] |He's also a little too fond of his own Writing 101 skills.
[225004240450] |Several times he concocts little explanatory vignettes, but then rather takes it too far, going on not for a paragraph or two, but a full page.
[225004240460] |He also tends to give us these tantalizing teasers about future chapters (like "X would have to wait until Y before...").
[225004240470] |I found these a bit tiresome.
[225004240480] |A bit too much like Behind The Music documentaries which tease you before each commercial break. 
[225004240490] |Deutscher has been criticized for treating Benjamin Lee Whorf too harshly (see my review of his NYTs article <a>here </a>for specifics).
[225004240500] |At one point in this book he call Whorf the most notorious of the [linguistic relativity] con men.
[225004240510] |This is odd, to me, because in Part 1 Deutscher repeatedly channels Whorfs own claims and even language.
[225004240520] |If you were to read Whorf's original 1940 essay <a>Science and Linguistics</a> (pdf), one of his early drafts of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, you'd have to conclude that he and Deutscher are best pals, simpatico.
[225004240530] |They both make the same distinction between folk theories and science; they both emphasize the need to question one's own pre-conceived notions, and both concoct straw men to argue against. 
[225004240540] |Both Deutscher and Whorf sketch for us the basic assumptions of the common man (Deutscher actually uses the phrase Joe the Plumber, Peirs the Ploughman, or Tom Piper's son to represent this straw man at one point).
[225004240550] |But I couldn't help but shake my head at some of the things Deutscher thinks you and his readers are running around thinking, like "primitive people speak primitive languages" (page 99; this is an echoing of Whorf as well).
[225004240560] |I have no doubt that SOME people think this, but is this the average person?
[225004240570] |Deutscher needs this straw man to create the space of need that he fills.
[225004240580] |Joe the Plumber NEEDS Deutscher to save him from his ignorance. 
[225004240590] |In a similar vein, Deutscher also uses some questionable assumptions.
[225004240600] |On page 101 he seems to assume that our contemporary notions of aboriginal languages comes from Tintin and Westerns...huh?
[225004240610] |Frikkin Tintin?
[225004240620] |I had to Google that.
[225004240630] |And Westerns?
[225004240640] |Does Deutscher think it's 1955? 
[225004240650] |The portion of Part 1 I liked most was the last 20 pages or so where he really starts to get into the meat of how language and culture intermix.
[225004240660] |If only this were the FIRST 20 pages, but alas. 
[225004240670] |He finally starts to get into really interesting issues of culture and language when he discusses complexity and language.
[225004240680] |I found it a little confusing that he would claim, and strongly so, that "No one has ever measured the overall complexity of even one single language, not to mention all of them.
[225004240690] |No one even has an idea how to measure the overall complexity of a language" (page 105).
[225004240700] |Then he claims that it is inherently impossible to compare the complexity of two languages (page 109). 
[225004240710] |My position is that this is simply false and it is odd for Deutscher to have published those sentences.
[225004240720] |What Deutscher is doing, I think, is defining his own version of what it means to "measure the overall complexity of a language" in such a way that the many attempts to do so, dating back to the 1940s, don't count.
[225004240730] |He's playing a rhetorical game like politicians do when they pledge to cut taxes in such a way that when they fail to do it later on, they can wiggle out beneath their words to make it look like they lived up to them nonetheless.
[225004240740] |Linguists and logicians have long been interested in measuring linguistic complexity.
[225004240750] |Deutscher makes it look like this is not so.
[225004240760] |He may not like these attempts.
[225004240770] |He may wish to debate their merits, but they do exist.
[225004240780] |All you have to do is Google "<a>measuring linguistic complexity</a>" and you get a whole host of results, like these:
[225004240790] |<li>Gruber, J. &Gibson, E. (2004).
[225004240800] |<a>Measuring linguistic complexity independent of plausibility</a>.
[225004240810] |Language, 80, 583-590.</li>
[225004240820] |<li>Juola, Patrick, <a>Assessing Linguistic Complexity</a>, Duquesne University.</li>
[225004240830] |<li>McWhorter, John (2001).
[225004240840] |The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars.
[225004240850] |Linguistic Typology 5, pp. 125–66</li>
[225004240860] |<li>Bane, Max.
[225004240870] |<a>Quantifying and Measuring Morphological Complexity</a>.</li>
[225004240880] |<li>Dahl, Östen , <a>Are all languages</a> Equally Complex?
[225004240890] |(PPT)</li> 
[225004240900] |We discover quite quickly what Deutscher is doing as he begins to walk through complexity issues of "particular areas of language" (page 109), namely morphology, phonology, and subordination.
[225004240910] |And these last 15 pages are really the gem of Part 1.
[225004240920] |He shows that there is an interesting, somewhat illogical, entirely engaging but as yet unexplained set of correlations between speaker population size and linguistic complexity. 
[225004240930] |For example, languages with small numbers of speakers tend to have more morphologically rich grammars (hence one could claim that small = more complex).
[225004240940] |However, small languages with small numbers of speakers also tend to have small phonological inventories.
[225004240950] |Hmmm, weird, right? 
[225004240960] |Deutscher suggests that there could be a cultural reason behind these facts, I'll call it the stranger theory: small societies mostly involve communication with well known people, so they share a lot of background knowledge that does not need to be repeated, hence making more efficient communication.
[225004240970] |Deutscher makes an interesting case for the stranger theory that goes beyond this and is worth thinking about. 
[225004240980] |This review may come across as unduly harsh because I was disappointed in the lack of science in Part 1 and that complexity quip got under my skin.
[225004240990] |Truly, I really am looking forward to reading and reviewing Part 2. 
[225004241000] |Guy Deutscher (2010).
[225004241010] |Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Metropolitan Books
[225004250010] |<title>EFL in Na'vi</title>
[225004250020] |Well, I finally watched Avatar.
[225004250030] |Dear gawd that was an awful movie.
[225004250040] |No one ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of American movie goers.
[225004250050] |Oh well. 
[225004250060] |I posted a bit about the creation of the Na'vi language <a>here</a>, but when I watched the movie, there was one glaring linguistic issue that seems to have gone entirely unnoticed: English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Na'vi.
[225004250070] |According to the story, some of the Na'vi attended a school at some point where they were taught English, so we get to hear them speak not only Na'vi, which everyone loves to talk about, but also English, which everyone missed as an interesting lingo-topic (as far as I can tell). 
[225004250080] |My point is that they're remarkably good at nuanced English constructions, except when the writers decided they had to throw in an EFL error to make it look more realistic, and they didn't do a good job of thinking about what Na'vi EFL errors might look like.
[225004250090] |I suspect they did not consult Frommer on this question. 
[225004250100] |Here's the first English we get to hear from the first two Na'vi characters to speak English on screen, transcribed as faithfully as possible by yours truly, and not including the intervening dialogue of Jake Sully. 
[225004250110] |<b>Neytiri</b>
[225004250120] |<li>Don't thank.
[225004250130] |You don't thank for this.
[225004250140] |This is sad.
[225004250150] |Very sad only.</li>
[225004250160] |<li>All this is your fault.
[225004250170] |They did not need to die.</li>
[225004250180] |<li>Your fault.
[225004250190] |Your fault.
[225004250200] |You're like a baby.
[225004250210] |Making noise.
[225004250220] |Don't know what to do.</li>
[225004250230] |<li>Why save you?</li>
[225004250240] |<li>You have a strong heart.
[225004250250] |No fear.
[225004250260] |But stupid.
[225004250270] |Ignorant like a child.</li>
[225004250280] |<li>Sky people can not learn.
[225004250290] |They do not see.</li>
[225004250300] |<li>No one can teach you to see.</li>
[225004250310] |<li>You're like a baby.</li>
[225004250320] |<li>You should not be here.</li>
[225004250330] |<li>No. Go back.</li>
[225004250340] |<li>Go back.</li>
[225004250350] |<li>Seeds of the sacred tree.
[225004250360] |Very pure spirits.</li>
[225004250370] |<li>Come.
[225004250380] |Come.</li>
[225004250390] |<li>My father is deciding whether to kill you.</li>
[225004250400] |<li>That is mother.
[225004250410] |She is Tsahik.
[225004250420] |The one who interprets the will of Ewah.</li> 
[225004250430] |<b>Mo'at</b> (mother of Neytiri)
[225004250440] |<li>What are you called?</li>
[225004250450] |<li>Why did you come to us?</li>
[225004250460] |<li>We have tried to teach other sky people.</li>
[225004250470] |<li>It is hard to fill a cup which is already full.</li>
[225004250480] |<li>What are you?</li>
[225004250490] |<li>It is decided.
[225004250500] |My daughter will teach you our ways.
[225004250510] |Learn well Jake Sully.
[225004250520] |Then we'll see if your insanity can be cured.</li> 
[225004250530] |Based solely on the written form of the speech examples we have above, I think it can be said that these two Na'vi speakers speak pretty good English (they played up accents heavily in the movie to try to disguise this so I want to focus on the written speech).
[225004250540] |What's most striking is how good they are at some things that non-native speakers, especially those who have had as little exposure to English as presumably the Na'vi must have had given the movie's plot.
[225004250550] |Now, the sentence structure alone isn't going to be critiqued because, in the context of the dialogue, something like "ignorant like a child" sounded natural and acceptable. 
[225004250560] |What they're good at that I would have expected them to have problems with:
[225004250570] |<li><b>Contractions</b>: They both fluently use you're, don't, and we'll.</li>
[225004250580] |<li><b>Quantifiers</b>: all this and no one.</li>
[225004250590] |<li><b>Subjectless Imperatives</b>: Go back, Come, Learn well Jake Sully.</li>
[225004250600] |<li><b>Degree Modifying Adjectives</b>: <b>Very</b> pure spirits.</li>
[225004250610] |<li><b>Progressive Aspect</b>: My father <b>is deciding</b> whether to kill you.</li>
[225004250620] |<li><b>Multiple Subordinations</b>: Then [we'll see if [your insanity can be cured]]. </li>
[225004250630] |<li><b>Embedded Modals</b>: Then we'll see if your insanity <b>can be</b> cured.
[225004250640] |This is a very difficult thing for virtually all EFL students.</li>
[225004250650] |<li><b>Hypotheticals</b>: Then we'll see <b>if</b> your insanity can be cured, My father is deciding <b>whether</b> to kill you.</li>
[225004250660] |<li><b>Use of which</b>: It is hard to fill a cup <b>which</b> is already full.
[225004250670] |This one confuses even native speakers of English.</li>
[225004250680] |<li><b>Dummy </b><b>it</b><b>-Subject</b>: <b>It</b> is decided</li> 
[225004250690] |Nonetheless, even with this impressive fluency, they managed to pepper in some errors.
[225004250700] |My hunch is that the writers threw these in to make them look like non-native speakers but they spent much less time thinking about the nature of how the Na'vi should speak English than they did about how they should speak Na'vi: 
[225004250710] |Errors
[225004250720] |<li><b>Omitted Determiner</b>: That is mother.</li>
[225004250730] |<li><b>Adverb Placement</b>: Very sad <b>only</b> (this is the best example of a clear EFL-style error in the passages above, probably in the whole movie.
[225004250740] |Yeah, adverbs are tough.)</li>
[225004250750] |<li><b>Awkward Construction Choice</b>: What are you called?
[225004250760] |This is first day English class: Q: What is you name?
[225004250770] |A.
[225004250780] |My name is Bruno.</li> 
[225004250790] |Some constructions are ambiguous:
[225004250800] |<li><b>Copula</b>: It is decided.
[225004250810] |This is a semantically difficult stative copula where the state is expressed by a past-tense verb (i.e., it is in the state of having been decided) which is acceptable in English, but is likely to be used only by highly fluent speakers.
[225004250820] |If this is an erroneous form of It has been decided, did some part of Na'vi grammar cause such an error?</li>
[225004250830] |<li><b>Failed Contractions</b>: They did not need to die, Sky people can not learn, You should not be here.
[225004250840] |While I lauded their fluent use of contractions above, they're rather inconsistent.
[225004250850] |Again, it's like the writers wanted to throw in a "can not" here and there just to make it sound less fluent.</li> 
[225004260010] |<title>RIP: Fred Jelinek</title>
[225004260020] |A nice eulogy by Hal Daume <a>here</a>. 
[225004260030] |<b>UPDATE</b>: Here is a PDF of Jelinek's ACL Lifetime Achievement Award speech: <a>The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT</a>.
[225004260040] |Money quote: 
[225004260050] |Research in both ASR and MT continues.
[225004260060] |The statistical approach is clearly dominant.
[225004260070] |The knowledge of linguists is added wherever it fits.
[225004260080] |And although we have made significant progress, we are very far from solving the problems.
[225004260090] |That is a good thing: We can continue accepting new students into our field without any worry that they will have to search, in the middle of their careers, for new fields of action.
[225004270010] |<title>X will Y here</title>
[225004270020] |<a>Lauren</a> pointed me to a new slogan for the Pittsburgh Penguins "Amazing Will Strike Here" and it turns out its a part of a set of slogans: 
[225004270030] |These are all plays on the construction X will Y here. 
[225004270040] |I don't like any of them, in the sense that they don't seem inspiring, but rather clunky and awkward...then again I am a Sabres fan...
[225004280010] |<title>Through the Language Glass delay</title>
[225004280020] |Just fyi, I promised part 2 of my <a>Through the Language Glass</a> review today.
[225004280030] |I have finished the book and have much to say.
[225004280040] |Too much.
[225004280050] |My review is about 50% complete but needs work.
[225004280060] |In the least, I need to add discussion of categorical perception, color terms, and galvanic skin response.
[225004280070] |I have a brilliant! shocking proposal to add.
[225004280080] |Should be done by Wednesday morning.
[225004290010] |<title>In Defense of Hauser</title>
[225004290020] |The Harvard Crimson has published an Op Ed, <a>Who Will Speak for Hauser</a>?, by two of Marc Hauser's colleagues who defend him against what they see as "irresponsible and inaccurate" journalism and they insinuate that several prominent scholars have engaged in a smear campaign (my word, not theirs) against Hauser because they disagree with his results.
[225004290030] |These are serious accusations and my reaction is that this Op Ed is also irresponsible and potentially inaccurate (about the motivations of the other prominent scholars). 
[225004290040] |But this is due in no small part to Hauser's own silence.
[225004290050] |Harvard needs to release its findings and Hauser needs to have a press conference. 
[225004310010] |<title>Through the Language Glass (Part 2)</title>
[225004310020] |This is part 2 of my review of Guy Deutscher's new book <a>Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages</a>.
[225004310030] |This covers The Language Lens (129-249).
[225004310040] |Part 1 is <a>here</a>.
[225004310050] |This review will cover the scientific evidence that Deutscher reviews suggesting that language affects thought, and will end with a shocking proposal. 
[225004310060] |To sum up my review of part one: meh.
[225004310070] |Okay, we've established that culture can influence language.
[225004310080] |This is a lot less controversial than Deutscher makes it seem and he spent a large amount of text defending that position.
[225004310090] |Okay, whatever, time to move on.
[225004310100] |In part 2 he again begins with historical review explaining why he thinks Whorf was a con man, but also why he thinks the core insights of early linguist relativity deserve closer, honest investigation.
[225004310110] |He complains that based his Hopi claims on just one lonely informant (p142).
[225004310120] |We'll see later that Deutscher himself falls for the same trap.
[225004310130] |He replaces Whorf with the Boas-Jakobson principle that languages differ in what they must convey, not what they may convey” (151).
[225004310140] |I respect Deutscher for making this a central theme in his book because I think he's right.
[225004310150] |To parrot his own recitation of Humbolt: any thought can be expressed in any language.
[225004310160] |It is what our native language forces us to foreground that makes linguistic relativity an interesting topic. 
[225004310170] |Deutscher spends most of the second part of the book reviewing three areas of language that have provided evidence that language affects thought: spatial coordinates, grammatical gender, and color terms (familiar from part 1).
[225004310180] |The general point I want to make about his evidence is that it is far weaker than he maintains.
[225004310190] |But is is interesting.
[225004310200] |A brief set of reactions: 
[225004310210] |<b>Spatial Coordinates -- everything is embodied</b> Most of his argumentation about the affect of spacial coordinate terms on thought stems from Levinson's evidence from speakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr which is famous for giving us the word “kangaroo.”
[225004310220] |Speakers of GY do not generally use ego-centric terms like "right" and "left" but rather use cardinal direction terms like "east" and "west."
[225004310230] |As a result, Deutscher claims, they remember information about situations differently than speakers of English.
[225004310240] |They have, so the argument goes, a perfect pitch for direction and they are always attuned to where north is. Deutscher's claim is that only the linguistic repetition of such terms can possibly account for this.
[225004310250] |Hence, their language affects what they pay attention to and what they remember, hence language affects thought. 
[225004310260] |I've never found this line of research all that convincing regarding linguistic relativity and Deutscher does not really add much to the debate.
[225004310270] |Like Deutscher's complaint above regarding Whorf's one lonely Hopi speaker, it turns out there are not many native speakers of Guugu Yimithirr left and haven't been for a while.
[225004310280] |These experiments on directional language involve very few speakers, and most of them have both cardinal direction and ego-centric direction in their dialect.
[225004310290] |If we're going to complain about Whorf's restricted subject pool, we must complain about Levinson's too. 
[225004310300] |But more to the point, I believe all direction terms are ultimately ego-centric insofar as they are embodied.
[225004310310] |The terms "north" and "south" are not magically universal.
[225004310320] |They are based on a human being's body and orientation (i.e., ego-centric).
[225004310330] |Don't believe me, ask yourself, what does "north" mean in space?
[225004310340] |What does "north" mean to an amoeba?
[225004310350] |Mostly what Deutscher does in his discussions of direction terms is reiterate the point he belabored in Part 1: culture affects language.
[225004310360] |Yeah, we got that already. 
[225004310370] |<b>The rise of similarity judgments</b> That is until he discusses the table experiments.
[225004310380] |These experiments show subjects tables with objects on them and ask them to arrange them in accordance with a target.
[225004310390] |Basically, they ask for similarity judgement.
[225004310400] |How can you make this table arrangement similar to the previous table.
[225004310410] |This methodological paradigm has become prominent in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, especially studies testing linguistic relativity.
[225004310420] |In fact, all of the studies Deutscher discusses are similarity judgment studies of one sort or another.
[225004310430] |The point is that I show you one target thing, then two test things and ask, which test is MORE SIMILAR to the target than the other?
[225004310440] |Ultimately Deutscher himself problematizes spatial coordinate terms so much, they fall flat and remain unconvincing as a base of evidence for linguistic relativity. 
[225004310450] |<b>Grammatical Gender</b> Most languages have terms for classifying things.
[225004310460] |Some languages have more elaborate classifier systems than others.
[225004310470] |In German, the term for the fork is die Gabel, marked by feminine die.
[225004310480] |Ultimately, most languages with elaborate classifiers have systems that can be described as incoherent in so far as most things given one classification have no inherent properties that signify that classification (there is nothing inherently feminine about a fork).
[225004310490] |However, Deutscher provides evidence that speakers of languages with grammatical gender will evoke properties of things in keeping with their gender classifier, suggesting that the classifier is causing them to imagine a fork would speak with a female voice, for example.
[225004310500] |But these experiments mainly test vague associations of imagination, not linguistic causality, as Deutscher admits. 
[225004310510] |<b>Color Terms</b> It is not until chapter 9 Russian Blues that Deutscher really delivers the goods.
[225004310520] |It is this chapter which provides the most interesting evidence for the effect of language on thought.
[225004310530] |Pity it is only about 15 pages of the book.
[225004310540] |The whole book should have been more like this.
[225004310550] |The facts he discusses involve the basic point that the brain sees what it wants to see.
[225004310560] |It turns out our perception of color has little to do with any objective feature of the thing we're looking at (he explains this fact brilliantly in the Appendix which I highly recommend, and frankly, should have been the first chapter, not relegated to the attic of an appendix).
[225004310570] |The point is that our brains change the input.
[225004310580] |As our eyes take in objective photons, our brain photoshops the input (a great analogy from Deutscher which really brings the point home). 
[225004310590] |The experimental results Deutscher discusses involve more similarity judgements, albeit with a twist.
[225004310600] |Instead of relying solely on the similarity judgments, researchers studied the more objective reaction time.
[225004310610] |They showed people different color patches and asked them to judge the sameness.
[225004310620] |Despite the various and clever variations on this theme, they all relied on subjective judgements of similarity.
[225004310630] |And this is where they fail to extricate themselves from the problem of strategizing. 
[225004310640] |Unfortunately they all share the critical flaw that making a similarity judgment is a logical reason act and may be mitigated by strategizing.
[225004310650] |Deutscher discusses this fact, but doesn't realize that none of the fixes work.
[225004310660] |A similarity judgment is always a logical process susceptible to the effects of strategizing.
[225004310670] |This will be a major issue in my Shocking Proposal at the end.
[225004310680] |You see, regardless of how clever the test, as long as you are basically asking a subject to make a similarity judgment, you are asking them to reason about the task.
[225004310690] |So your results will be tinged by the strategizing of human subjects as they logically try to game the system.
[225004310700] |This is well known in psycholinguistics and difficult to avoid.
[225004310710] |So how do you objectively test what colors a person considers blue?
[225004310720] |<b>A Shocking Proposal</b> The paradigm already exists.
[225004310730] |How can you objectively prove that English speakers really do consider aspirated /kh/ and unaspirated /k/ both the same phoneme?
[225004310740] |You condition them to fear aspirated /kh/ by shocking them every time they hear it (measuring their galvanic skin response).
[225004310750] |Once they are conditioned, you then play them unaspirated /k/ (with no shock) and check to see if you get the same GSR spike (in anticipation). 
[225004310760] |Okay, now apply this to color terms.
[225004310770] |Condition subjects to fear center of the category blue, then show them gradations.
[225004310780] |What causes the GSR spike?
[225004310790] |That's what they consider blue. now do that with speakers of 40 different languages. 
[225004310800] |If the hippies on the human subjects review board let you do it, there's your dissertation. 
[225004310810] |Guy Deutscher (2010).
[225004310820] |Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.
[225004310830] |Metropolitan Books